She recollected how Tracy's flaming head had sprung up before her—he who had always prophesied that she would be famous for arts unknown to her, and not for song just when she was having a vision of triumph and caressing the idea of her imprisoned voice bursting its captivity, and soaring into its old heavens.
“He does not care for music!” interjected Sir Purcell, with something like a frown. “I have nothing in common with him. But that I might have known. I can have nothing in common with a man who is not to be impressed by music.”
“I love him quite as well,” said Emilia. “He is a quick friend. I am always certain of him.”
“And I imagine also that you are quits with your quick friend,” added Sir Purcell. “You do not care for verse, or he for voices!”
“Poetry?” said Emilia; “no, not much. It seems like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again....”
“And making the same noise when they get at the end—like the bears!” Sir Purcell slightly laughed. “You don't approve of the rhymes?”
“Yes, I like the rhymes; but when you use words—I mean, if you are in earnest—how can you count and have stops, and—no, I do not care anything for poetry.”
Sir Purcell's opinion of Emilia, though he liked her, was, that if a genius, she was an incomplete one; and his positive judgement (which I set down in phrase that would have startled him) ranked both her and Tracy as a pair of partial humbugs, entertaining enough. They were both too real for him.
Haply at that moment the girl was intensely susceptible, for she chilled by his side; and when he left her she begged Madame to walk fast. “I wonder whether I have a cold!” she said.
Madame explained all the signs of it with tragic minuteness, deciding that Emilia was free at present, and by miracle, from this English scourge; but Emilia kept her hands at her mouth. Over the hornbeam hedge of the lane that ran through the market-gardens, she could see a murky sunset spreading its deep-coloured lines, that seemed to her really like a great sorrowing over earth. It had never seemed so till now; and, entering the house, the roar of vehicles in a neighbouring road sounded like something implacable in the order of things among us, and clung about her ears pitilessly. Running upstairs, she tried a scale of notes that broke on a cough. “Did I cough purposely?” she asked herself; but she had not the courage to try the notes again. While dressing she hummed a passage, and sought stealthily to pass the barrier of her own watchfulness by dwelling on a deep note, from which she was to rise bursting with full bravura energy, and so forth on a tide of song. But her breath failed. She stared into the glass and forced the note. A panic caught at her heart when she heard the sound that issued. “Am I ill? I must be hungry!” she exclaimed. “It is a cough! But I don't cough! What is the matter with me?”